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Apparitions of Christmases Past

Fortunately sueperry-paintings is a path selected by few; otherwise its proprietor would need feel even more reprehensible for its neglect since March 2015 when the last post was made. Be that as it may, it’s time to put regrets aside. As a way of re-establishing a foothold in the present, she thinks (on this snowy day in Seattle) to step back and review the Xmas cards familiar to many readers as illustrated Holiday Greetings from Sue and John in the years 2015-2017:

You may remember 2015: “Un Coup de Dés” was a work begun in 2012 when John and Sue were still able to make what was an annual visit to Paris. By 2015, this practice had been discontinued, but when mobs of angry adolescent males attacked “A la Bonne Biere” only a few blocks from the usual Perry nesting place in Paris, Sue quickly completed this painting, adding only a small still life under the pendant lamp at the left, taken from a newspaper photo of the battered café which included a bullet hole next to one of the foregrounded chairs.

Christmas 2016 there was “Man Carrying Thing.” This was intended as an initial effort in a continuation of the “Changing Times” project begun at the Sisko Gallery in Seattle January 2014, when John Sisko staged an exhibit focused on transitions in the Seattle landscape since about 1990 when Sue’s paintings began to reflect her new home there. As a commercial effort, this project was only moderately successful; nevertheless Sue had hoped that Mr. Sisko would be willing to update that effort with another dozen or so works which have emerged as a result of daily walks in her immediate neighborhood—where evidence of Seattle’s “progress bomb” has been dramatic. The metaphoric man in this painting faces a couple of familiar landmarks: in the distance, the Space Needle; more immediately, the soon-to-disappear Progressive Baptist Church. On the horizon one of the building cranes now scattered everywhere. Alas, the Sisko gallery has since closed, a victim of (among more personal misfortunes) high rents which have enriched developers while impoverishing Seattle’s art scene.

“Goddess of Time” appeared Christmas 2017. It is a themed work, with evidence of time past and to come littering a landscape where stands a young girl who will inherit the many challenges facing young people everywhere. It is in some way, a reworking of an earlier painting . . .

This much larger 1998 painting commemorated University Heights School, re-purposed around then to non-scholarly activities as a result of profitable real estate ventures. Like “Goddess,” it features a young girl in a world not of her making. Surrounded by adults preoccupied by various marketing pursuits, she stares directly at us. Juxtaposed, “Her” and “Goddess” display developments in the painter’s style 1998 – 2017. The painter leaves it to viewers to remark on the nature of these changes. Meanwhile, she hopes henceforth to resume regular postings inspired by her ongoing study of Seattle’s shifting scene.